


Meta: Whovian Analyses

by Tammany



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Analysis, Discussion, Meta, Nit-picking, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-08 22:52:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12263715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: Hello. Allow me to introduce myself just a bit.I'm Tammany. I'm a fic writer, but I also do meta. For the past umpety-ump years I've been running a huge, gobstopper of a meta collection over on the Sherlock channel. I enjoy Moffat's work, and love his structures, and have fun picking them apart to see how they fit together. I have been writing more about Doctor Who, about Moffat's work on the show, and again--just on the show--lately, and it seems fit and honest to set up a meta collection here, to hold the Whovian analyses.If you like crazed fans writing pseudo-academic fan squee and squawk about big arcs and recurring themes and the nature of the franchise, you may have fun. Or not. But welcome to all, both new and those who know me from over Sherlock-way.





	1. Season 10: The Doctor and Death

 

 

Season Ten: The Doctor and Death.

 

 

This is going to be a compromise article. It will go on too briefly about a topic demanding exhaustive depth and precision, while going on too long for most short articles.

 

 

That said, it will be as long, and as precise, as I currently have time for, and it's too crucial to the current status of how one interprets both the Doctor and Steven Moffat's overall arcs not to want to dig further into something I have already touched on briefly.

 

 

I will be citing a huge block of canonical material before I actually get around to arguing my point, because even as fleeting an examination of this subject as I am attempting needs support. Therefore it seems only fair to state outright and upfront that, unless I miss my guess, season 10 can and should be read to some degree as the Doctor's negotiation with his own death, and with a depression that is willing him to commit some form of suicide. "Suicide by misadventure," perhaps? Just--I'll explain more explicitly after I marshal my canon points, many though they are. But just let it sit in your mind while you review my background logic. By my interpretation the Doctor spends season 10 mentally turning toward death, preparing himself to end the game begun so long before.

 

 

First, I would choose to point out a few constants of NuWho.

 

1\. The Doctor longs for and needs companions.

 

2\. The Doctor hates losing companions. As River says, he hates endings and he hates goodbyes.

 

3\. He hates death--it is the antithesis of who he wants to be as "the Doctor." He wants to be a healer. He is miserable and angry when he feels he is instead a soldier.

 

4\. The Doctor does not like it when regeneration comes upon him. All four modern Doctors have mourned their own passing, to greater or lesser degrees. All four have treated their regeneration as a form of death.

 

5\. This is in keeping with Old Who, though more explicit. It is also in keeping with the Old Who tendency to talk of prior incarnations as completely different people. Old and NuWho both show multiple Doctors, when brought together, as showing an uneasy, often catty competitiveness, as though each is vying for their right to exist and occupy the Doctoral Throne.

 

Now, for a few points in a too-short timeline.

 

1\. The 10th Doctor, having fallen in love with Rose, sacrifices his own chance to exist with her, giving it to yet another pseudo-regeneration who is merely mortal. He himself returns to his own Doctoral role, and mourns moodily--a state of Hamlet-like gloom made worse by Donna's necessary (but vile) mind erasure. He enters his own regeneration stating outright something the 9th Doctor only implied strongly. "I don't want to go." His behavior makes it clear that he, as a specific incarnation, will "die." He does not comment on what will survive, but he makes it clear he himself will not. (wry grimace) And if he himself can't be believed, after 9 (10) regenerations, who can?

 

2\. During his incarnation as the 10th Doctor, he encounters River Song, and is presented with the painful knowledge that he will love and marry someone he will eventually cherish (insofar as evidence can be trusted), but will know all the time he is with her when and where and how she will die. If he is to respect the nicer strictures of time-travel he will be unable to share that with her, or change her destiny--and she herself does not want her "past" altered. Given what we already had been shown about the Doctor, this is a form of living hell: he will love her. He's already half in love with her. However, he won't have the luxury of not knowing precisely what's coming to take her from him. She comes to him pre-deceased, as it were.

 

3\. He incarnates and promptly picks a companion *he* most relates to as a little girl. That she doesn't really join her until she's a fully mature and sexually active woman does not change the underlying relationship between the Doctor and little Amelia Pond. When, eventually, he and Amy begin to be mutually attracted, that child-bond and Rory are sufficient to allow the Doctor to keep his amorous Companion at arm's length, sparing him any fear of romantic entanglement--and missing the fact that, romantic or not, he and Amy have one of the closest and most intimate peer-like relationships. She's not just his friend: she is his intimate companion, who understands his motives and second guesses his thinking and meddles in his life with more freedom than any other Companion I can recall. Indeed, their intimacy and willingness to meddle in each other's personal lives turns the Amy-Rory-Doctor era into one of the most soap-opera eras of Doctor Who. This is only intensified by the return of River Song and all the complicated plots that then ensue.

 

4\. The most outstanding aspect of the 11th Doctor's relationship with River is his constant defensiveness and rejection. He is intrigued, attracted, mystified, and fascinated. His is also fearful, angry, resentful, sarcastic, distant, and heavily armored. It is no accident that he insults her often, rebukes her regularly, but never says he loves her. Even as he is drawn into a romantic relationship, he wards himself against her eventual loss--a loss he knows is coming. Note that, in the 11th's last encounter with River, when she appears to him as a data ghost, he says he always sees her, but has never admitted it because he feared it would hurt too much. When she suggests she could have born the pain, he corrects her: He states explicitly that he had feared it would have hurt *him* too much--and that he had been right. I myself think it is important to apply that statement to all the Doctor's interactions with beloved ones--and all his own evasions, and all his mourning. Losing the people he loves is agony. Their memory is painful. He runs away into new regeneration after new regeneration and clings to new companion after new companion, always bleeding from past losses, and always dreading future losses. And it will only get worse. It is his nature coupled with his immortality. He will even mourn his past selves -- or at least fear joining them when the next regeneration comes along.

 

5\. The 11th Doctor goes haring after Clara for one clear, simple, openly expressed reason: because she is the "Impossible Girl." He does not give himself fully to that search and the following relationship until after he has lost Amy and Rory, and during a period in which logic suggests he's also aware that the coming final date with River is becoming harder and harder to avoid. He wants Clara because she appears to be immortal, in way different from but similar to his own regenerations. He is looking for a companion he can't lose; who can die and still return. He wants that so much that he turns away from River, and boxes up his grief for Amy and Rory, and throws himself into the Impossible Girl. When he finds her, she's not really what he hoped, and she leads him back to River in a strange and backward way. But she's also still the Impossible Girl, and she's woven into his life.

 

6\. In "The Husbands of River Song," Capaldi's Doctor does what no other Doctor has done to our knowledge. He marries for realsies. Twenty-four years plus any and all time he and River may steal for themselves by means of Tardis-jaunt. And if even then the Doctor avoids an outright statement of his love for her, he manages to express it in a charade so explicit it might as well be words. He *surrenders* to his love, and her death, because he realizes in the end that it's not just him paying the price as he avoids her: he's making her pay a price too ugly to keep demanding of her. He can't continue as he has, making her think she's unloved and unvalued. The principle of not talking to her ghost--or her real self--for fear of the pain to him, fails to take into account the pain he inflicts on her. So in the end, he bows head and bends knee and hands over his sword and armor, and gives himself to her for all the time they have left...a gift he has made no other Companion we know of, though there's obviously plenty of room to retcon other loves in, given the blank spaces in millennia the story leaves us.

 

7\. In "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" the 12th Doctor returns after River's death. We can deduce a few things from the show: first, he's been roaming post-death for some time. His relationship with Nardole is not in any sense "new." The two have already developed a comfortable "couples" bicker and banter. Nardole has learned to drive the Tardis. Thus, while this appears to be the first time the Doctor has returned to Earth since he's lost River, and it's twenty-four years between his encounter with Grant as a young boy, and his encounter with him as an adult man, we can't say anything useful about how long the Doctor has been in mourning other than "it's been awhile." He's sooooo not over it. He will continue to be shown to be not over it in the season 10 episode "Extremis," when even Missy will recognize the Doctor as being in mourning for River, and Nardole will change his course of action by reading from River's diary regarding her reasons for loving the Doctor. He will still be mourning River in the first episode of season 10, when his behavior and his desk photos make clear he's still in mourning. It may not be a thousand years since Missy went into her Vault...but it's not recent, either.

 

The Doctor certainly does not "get over it," during season 10, though he does appear to have finally found a good choice of companion in Bill--one who tempts him back out into time and space, and whose cheerful, curious, comfortable personality hits a perfect asexual sweet spot between friend and student.

 

Now, how does that all add up to the Doctor wanting to suicide, or at least to bow his head and bend his knee to death, as he did to love?

 

Let's remember he's died over and over, and while he hates doing it, he also seems more and more reluctant to do it *again.* That's canon over at least the first three incarnations of NuWho. Every time it's time to die, he resists, mourns, regrets. His new personality is not always a happy one, either, though you have to go back to Colin Baker in Old Who and match him to grumpy, uncertain 12th Doctor to make a clear argument for it. On top of that, the 12th Doctor is not just a new regeneration, he's a regeneration that is apparently unprecedented. He never should have been "born" by prior assumptions. His prior incarnation seemed to have come to a kind of peace with his expected "final" death on the planet Christmas. He may accept his sudden, unexpected new cycle with vim and vigor--but it's nothing he understood or was prepared for, and it forced him once again to "die."

 

So from the beginning, Capaldi plays a man unsure of what comes next, and reassessing who he is. He has been handed a gift he did not request. It will ensure that he does not find "peace." Life is not peaceful. He's not sure what his long immortality has made him: a monster or a marvel or something else entirely? Is he a "good man"?

 

He's a confused and frightened man. He's an angry man. He's a man wary of being hurt. Yet Clara immediately does hurt him. In spite of all she knows, and all she's experienced, she is unable to accept the 12th incarnation as being the posterity of the 11th, of carrying on his life and legacy. He's not HER Doctor, at a time when the Doctor needs his Impossible Girl to provide the continuity and sense of continued identity he sought, and the constancy of love/friendship he hoped for. He may see the ghost of River everywhere, but Clara can't see 'the Doctor" even when he's standing right in front of her.

 

It's a bad start for a man facing a situation he can't understand or make assumptions about. It's not clear if he's been given one more life, or twelve more, or a million more. It's not clear if the rules of regeneration have changed. What is clear is that, contrary to his expectations as he approached death on Christmas, it's not going to be the end, nor can he even begin to guess when it will end. We all know we will die some day, and few of us know when or how...but all of us can say roughly how long we can hope for. When we're human, it's the ordinary Biblical "thee score years and ten" -- seventy years -- that serves as a very rough estimate. When you're a Gallifreyan Time Lord, you may not be able to guess how many years, but you can expect it to be twelve incarnations, and then you're off the hook. You can lay it all down, let it go, stop fighting.

 

The Doctor, having already outlived most of his fellow Time Lords as near as we can determine, thought he had reached that ending. Instead he's expected to begin again...and this time with no promises except that someday he will die.

 

This truth weaves in and out of 12's two seasons with Clara: seasons that are all about death and loss, in so many ways. The death of Danny Pink and the entire Missy-oriented story of the false afterlife is only a start o n all the permutations of death and survival and survival guilt that drench those years.

 

Moffat apparently originally thought those years might end with "The Husbands of River Song." He made it his swansong. He closed the book on his characters by giving them the ending he wanted for them--not just for River, but the Doctor. Happily ever after isn't forever. It's just time--a little time in which to be happy. To love each other. To stop protecting ourselves from the inevitable sad ending, to enjoy the pleasure and treasure of the middle. That was where he thought he was leaving them, and his final say on the matter.

 

But, like the Doctor, he got a new and unasked for regeneration. One that can't have been well-timed, with a major Sherlock season coming down the tubes, and enough rocky to leave him knowing he didn't want to keep doing Doctor Who forever, and would not be allowed to in any case. But they gave him one more year...and he had to decide what he wanted to say with that year. So he's been talking about what an immortal thinks and feels and does when he's lost his true love, he's unsure he will ever just end naturally, and the closest thing he has to a peer is an evil villainess in a vault who claims to want to be redeemed but who can't be trusted to mean it.

 

Over the season Moffat plays with the Doctor's vulnerability and fragility. He blinds him--and shows him as both too vain to admit it and too helpless and stubborn to get help. He shows the Doctor faking his own regeneration process...

 

Think about that. Think about the implications of intentionally summoning up your own internal death-pyre. To me it looks quite a lot like the Gallifreyan version of "cutting." Where the 10th Doctor could push aside regeneration for a short while, holding his death at bay long enough to accomplish what he needs done, the 12th can call up his own death, let it play over him, and send it back to its kennel...and when it comes for him in earnest, he can hold it off, and hold it off, and try to trick it into letting him commit a true final sacrifice--or at least, that is what that fast burning end as he takes down the cybermen looks like to me.

 

In "The Pilot" the Doctor and Bill run from something inescable that has absorbed her love, and which can absorb them, too...something that can follow them wherever they go, whatever they do, and that turns away only because enough of Bill's love, Heather, remains to not want to harm them. Nice big death metaphor. The "Smile," in which you can't show your grief and mourn, or the emojibots will kill you. "Thin Ice," when the Doctor takes Bill to the last Frost Fair on the Thames, where he had previously taken River, and where death now lurks beneath their feet. "Knock Knock," in which a parallel is drawn between a man keeping his mother alive (if in captivity of a sort) by feeding her students to maintain her vitality...and the Doctor, feeding himself companions, and feeding his Vault Prisoner to keep her alive. And through that, the hints on Nardole's part that the Doctor is dicing with death in dealing with the prisoner in the vault. "Oxygen," in which the Doctor risks his own life to save Bill, then gambles on "saving" her by letting her be killed, and loses his sight. And lies about recovering. He's dicing with death--Bill's and his own--through the whole episode, and overplays his hand enough to take serious damage from it.

 

The whole season is like that. You can sit down and go through and find the Doctor not just being reckless and wildly optimistic, as he has always tended to be. He's pushing too far, taking risks without bold elan, but with cold, calculated brinksmanship, seeing how far over the end he can hang before gravity takes over.

 

By the time we make it to "The Doctor Falls" it's explicit, and laid out over and over. Missy and the Master explore ways of killing the Doctor, asking for "requests." Bill states, outright, that she does not want to live if she can't live as herself--and asks the Doctor if he understands. He not only says he does--look at Capaldi's face. He's saying clearly that, yes. He DOES understand. He does not want to live if he can't be himself. He no more wants to feel a new "Doctor" take him over and destroy the old him than Bill wants to feel the Cybermen taking her apart, a bit at a time, replacing who she was with something else. The whole show is a prolonged discussion of people facing death. I mean--Nardole, "stronger than the Doctor," sent to become the father and husband and hero he's never been, but losing the right to "explode" that the Doctor is giving Bill--who wants to die, because the Doctor can't cure her. Nardole is explicit: the Doctor intends a suicide mission. A real one. Nordole KNOWS about regeneration, and he's treating the upcoming combat as suicide, and he wants to stand with the Doctor. The Doctor's speech about why he does what he does. He says without hesitation that he's going to be dead in a few hours. He argues it's worth it for this--for kindness. For decency. He challenges the Master and Missy to say what they would die for...what was big enough to give themselves to? There's the Master and Missy, killing each other. She kills him to be free to change, sending him away to become her as he regenerates. He kills her because he can't, won't change. He won't change. He will never stand by the Doctor, and he would rather die than see his own core self stolen away. And Missy's seductive, sentimental, haunted speech about how much she had loved being the Sim incarnation, who "burned like a sun, like an entire planet screaming." How she will always remember that feeling, and miss it. She remembers what it was like, when the Master was her--but he is dead in her, no more than a memory. Yet the living incarnation of that memory kills her.

 

The whole damned thing, to me, is the culmination of years of Moffat weaving in and out of the bittersweet nature of what it would be like to live so long, and be so alone. About the necessity of endings, which are always sad, and the joy of new beginnings. About what gives life meaning, and whether you can keep on if that meaning stops being there.

 

By the ending sequences, which question life and death over and over, It's a perfect storm of themes. And when, at last, the Doctor finds he's once again alive and on the verge of regeneration, it's entirely justified that he screams that he can't keep doing it--can't keep becoming someone else, dying over and over to let someone new take not only his place, but his memories and his life.

 

Twelve is the regeneration who knocked down an unbreakable wall over billions of years, to save his Impossible Girl--the eternal pseudo-Doctor Clara had become. He is the incarnation who surrenders to love and mortal loss of love. He is the one who appears to mourn for decades, and possibly centuries or millennia afterward. He is the incarnation living a life he never thought to get, with no remaining guiding rules or reliable expectations, and no end in sight but the end of the people he loves, over and over again.

 

He is also the First Doctor of a new cycle. It's perfect that he and the First First Doctor are going to come together, cross lines, learn from each other, and have their destinies changed. That they will both find reasons to accept the two-edged sword of regeneration, with all it implies: survival and death all in one package.

 

As for Moffat? He has to have laughed his ass off. He was ready to end his tenure with season 10. Then he found out that Chris Chibnal didn't want to pick up the Christmas Special, and it would not happen if Moffat didn't. So he's having to regenerate one more time, turn his two-parter into a three parter, and to take one more shot at sending his beloved Doctor off properly. He gave him a fit happily ever after with River, and it didn't stick. He devised a proper death taking down the Cybermen, and it didn't stick. I've got to admit, I am curious what one more trip to the well of the Doctor will bring us. What can poor Moffat find to say that is enough to make two different regenerations of the Doctor accept change, and to launch Jodi Whittaker's arrival as the first female Doctor?

 

Me, I hope it's good--and I hope that it will allow Capaldi's Doctor to die with the taste of "happily ever after" lingering, like honey in his mouth, rather than the ash of noble sacrifice. Of the two I prefer love and time. Just a little time.


	2. Moffat and Character Arcs: The Doctor and Love Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written BEFORE the last, but is posted now on request from my Sherlock meta, where I had posted it before deciding to establish the Whovian collection. It is reposted here by request.
> 
> It belongs here, though. Not only because it's Whovian rather than Sherlockian, but because it's tied to the first article's themes and concerns. With the Doctor's personal life, you're always balancing love, death, and loneliness. 
> 
> I like Moffat. I love the length of his arcs, and the considered growth of his characters. This essay can be considered as a companion to the previous one. If that one mainly focused on death, loneliness, and suicidal tendencies, this one focuses on love, loneliness, and fear of loss.

One of the things I like most about Steven Moffat’s work is the shape of his character arcs, and the underlying empathy he feels for his characters. I find that especially true of his handling of the Doctor, in Doctor Who, and the women who love him, and whom he loves. Even before he took charge of the show, his contribution to the emotional growth and development of the Doctor was solid. From the very first, he showed a romantic sensibility that rang true and sweet. In the two-parter “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” he caught the 9th Doctor up between contrasting longings, and ended one on a brilliant, joyful note—and the other one on a note of pathos. By the end of the two-parter, we’ve seen the Doctor rejoice that today, just once, nobody dies. We have also seen the Doctor helpless in his attraction to Rose, and his inability to find a way to woo her, while showing her clearly as the young, and youthfully heartless ingenue she is. Rose is attracted to the Doctor, yes—but he’s so much older, and he’s put up such walls, and along comes Captain Jack, sexy and interested and sweet-talking, and Rose turns to him in delight, failing to see the Doctor’s jealousy, even as he pushes himself to enter in.

In terms of hero-ing, he dances divinely. In terms of wooing a young adult Lolita, he dances like a donkey on dope.  He is ancient and immortal. She is very young, and ephemeral—due to die in the blink of a Gallifreyan’s eye. He is a traumatized, shattered veteran of a war of such scope it can’t really be described in mortal terms, sure of his own guilty dual-species genocide. She’s incapable of guilt, and even her “tragedies” are really just areas of emptiness—her father’s death occurs before her birth. She’s young and bright and full of energy and hunger, and he’s old and brilliant and restless and ravenous for something to blot out his own pain.

All that is there in those two episodes, clarifying why an ancient immortal might long for as shallow and self-centered and young a girl as Rose Tyler—and at the same time showing how tragic a match that is.

“The Girl in the Fireplace” carries the characters’ love arc further. Rose is back more or less with Mickey, with the 10th Doctor distancing himself while still attracted—only to be offered the heart of a legend: the beautiful, brilliant, amazing Madame Pompadour.

We know it’s doomed. The Doctor knows it’s doomed, too. But he’s charmed, fascinated, attracted, capable of wishing as all people do that what must be, won’t be, and what will inevitably happen will be escaped. He knows who she is. He knows how she dies. He knows she is mortal—and so crucial to history that it’s not going to be easy to change the time lines, if he can at all. And yet…with Rose hosting her own boyfriend/buddy, and romance calling, he can long for what he knows he can’t have.

The show takes the two themes of “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” and combines them: the Doctor’s war against death, and his longing to have a companion. In this one, death steals her away, and we’re shown why an immortal hates death: not out of fear it will someday take him, but out of knowledge that it will someday take away everyone he loves. Death will steal them all from him, without mercy, without stopping, without even a pause to let them look back in regret.

And then, after the Doctor-light “Blink,” he wrote another two-parter: “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.” In those he gave us River Song, whose first introduction to the Doctor is the proof and certainty that he will lose her. River is a gauntlet thrown in the face of repeated and overt issues of the Doctor. In his very first encounter with her, she dies. She steals his thunder by dying for him--and rescuing him in the process. She knows more than he does. She's clearly a fellow time-traveler. She proves her claim to intimacy he has denied his Companions repeatedly. For a character who hates death, hates endings, hates goodbyes, she's a nightmare and a miracle rolled into one. Oddly, few people seem to notice this key element, though it's all very in-your-face, dealing with Doctoral issues that have been stated outright and overtly in both Old Who, and practically shrieked in NuWho. The Doctor hates death, yet the first thing the woman he marries does when he meets her is die, while also making it almost inescapable that he will love her--love her dearly. She's his worst nightmare come true.

This comes after Moffat had been witness to quite a lot that Russell Davies did with the Doctor and love. The Doctor had lost Rose—twice over. He’d been tagged after by an amorous Martha. He’d been tied in a fiercely asexual friendship with Donna. That had been a tidy, but rather emotionally plebian arc—an emotional pattern that could have been true of any mortal lover who lost the first girl, ignored the second, and escaped the whole issue with the third. It’s almost a classic post-break-up pattern, with very little sense of the Doctor as an immortal suffering an immortal’s loss. Perhaps the closest we come is the Doctor’s hunger for his mortal wife in “Human Nature/The Family of Blood.” In that, the Doctor appears almost to have willed himself to be lost and without memory, so he can live a life on the same time-scale as the mortals around him, for at least a time. And, yet, the story seems, if anything, to suggest the Doctor is too afraid to face love and immortality. Martha, who has earned his notice, goes not only unnoticed, but ignored to the point of insult, with the Doctor preferring a pretty, clueless, time-blind wifey, with courage and spine but no awareness to allow her to criticize him or object to his choices, and a lot of nice Victorian conditioning to keep her passive.

In “The Silence in the Library/Forest of Trees,” Moffat spins all of that around on its head. Instead of being the one who holds all the cards, knows all the future holds, makes all the choices, Moffat hands the Doctor a woman visually older than him (and older in character, too—someone with spine and courage and self-willed certainty). Someone who knows more about him than he knows about her. Someone who does not put up with much from him, and who behaves with a brash and flamboyant bravado that matches every swashbuckling, sashaying performance he’s handed others, over all his incarnations. She’s outside his knowledge, outside his control, beyond his understanding—and by the end of the two episodes he knows she is his future. By then, he’s more than a little convinced he’s met his wife—and lost her. He’s seen the woman he marries die—to save him. A woman whose most ferocious desire is that he not rewrite a single moment of the time they will have together. Someone who’s so passionate about it, and about him, that she will die to protect the years he has yet to see. He knows he will trust her with his name. He knows he will give her his heart.

He knows that every minute of what will come will be colored by her death. For him it will be a Greek chorus, a specter at the feast of love. The Doctor, already at war with death, already hating Goodbye, already aching from the cost of love for ephermals, has been handed his True Love (and yes, do please think in grand, mythic, Princess Bride terms here). He’s been shown the promised land—and watched her die. For him.

He saves her, of course—but in a way he at least seems convinced is only an echo, though one is forced to doubt he’s correct. (I still consider her saving in the Library to be a painfully obvious get-out-of-jail-free card. There are too many ways obvious just in the context of the two episodes to get River back to life…just as all those thousands of “saved” people are brought back to life….)

I am not sure how aware Moffat was of his coming promotion to show-runner at that point. I am sure that his own work not only created a clear set of statements about the Doctor and love for ephemerals, it helped sort out his own reactions to the Davies-era romances and romantic companions. Those episodes established clear and comprehensible conflicts in what the Doctor would like—and what he fears so badly that it colors all the relationships he can have.

He’s an immortal surrounded by beautiful, lovable mayflies. He can’t help wanting love—and falling in love. But, every time, he knows he’s going to be left alone again. And when he’s finally shown an adult, mature woman who seems up to his weight in a way Rose never was (though Madame Pompadour might have been), he meets her under circumstances that make his greatest fear completely inescapable. He can’t even *hope* that she will outlive him.

Note: this is why it’s vital to the arc that River later gives away her regenerations to save him. It reprises the problem as stated the first time in TSITL/FOTD: She is the woman whom he will love and marry. She’s the woman who loves him utterly. And because she loves him utterly, she gives her life for him—first in the Library, and then, again, in the episode “Killing Hitler,” when he no sooner finds she’s a Time Lady of sorts—with the potential to live as long as he does—than, whoops, sorry, she’s given those lives away. Because she’s willing to believe in him. She overcomes her conditioning, and she’s wonderful, and terrifying, and sexy, and mysterious, and she hits him like a thwack in the head with a cricket ball—and she does the one thing that ensures she will not live as long as he does. That the loop he and she can experience may be long—much longer than it would be with Amy, for example—but that it will still be limited by a single Time Lady’s lifetime, with no regenerations to fall back on.

That conflict, between love and loss, is the soul of the Doctor’s ongoing pattern with River from then on. He loves her. He’s fascinated by her. He’s terrified to give himself to her, though, because she WILL die. He knows it—bone deep. He knows far too much. In spite of her caution with spoilers, at the end she told him more than he should know, and he’s breaking apart with the knowledge.

In the end, Moffat even wrote him as abandoning River for Clara, skipping that final date at the Singing Towers of Darillium, to avoid having to experience that inevitable end, as though by failing to take her to see the towers, he can ensure that she will never go back to the Library, and he will never quite completely lose her.

And Clara….

Matt Smith at one point commented, in regards to River and Clara, that "It's always awkward to choose between your wife and your girlfriend." The implication’s obvious—as was the relationship between the Doctor and Clara: he pursued her, exactly in reverse of his long, slow, reluctant path to River, in which he resisted all the way.

The reason’s right there, of course. It’s one of the things I love about Moffat: the reasons are not only there, he’s often told the viewers multiple times what the problem is in the first place.

The Doctor hates death. He hates endings. He hates “goodbye.” He avoids them. It’s part of why he’s avoided getting embroiled with his companions throughout the entire history of the show. It’s why he leaves Sarah Jane behind. It’s why in spite of all temptation, he ultimately resisted Rose, no matter how he loved her. It’s why he actually seems quite relieved to give Amy over to Rory…and why her decision to then follow Rory into a fixed point in which she will never see her “Raggedy Man” again destroys him.

And then, when he’s beginning to fear his time with River is soon to end, when he’s stricken to the very core by the loss of Amy Pond, he realizes that the Impossible Girl is out there.

The girl who never really dies.

The girl who can be his companion forever and ever and ever.

The girl to whom he need never say “Goodbye,” without anticipating a certain matching “Hello again!”

Of course he goes chasing after the tantalizing dream, turning his back on River and her approaching death, hoping to find the anodyne to pain.

Yet even Clara turns out to be something other than what he hoped—and he “loses” both Clara and River as “immortal loves” in “The Name of the Doctor.”

And then we get the longish, tangled-ish arcs of “The Day of the Doctor/The Time of the Doctor.” In which, ultimately, the Doctor accepts his own death in one last, glorious face-off, only to find himself regenerated, with the eternal conundrum of what to do with all that time, and love, and lack of fellow immortals facing him.

Which brings us to Capaldi, who, to me, is as close to the Doctor Moffat always dreamed of writing as it’s possible to get.

A doctor who steps into life angry and confused and grumpy and trying to rediscover himself in the face of being granted a new lease on life he didn’t exactly want. He’d found a resolution. It had no longer mattered that River was going to die, and even Clara was going to die—though she’d be with him in spirit forever. Yet, whoops, hey-presto, he’s back, having to decide who he is—who THE DOCTOR really is, with so very many of his previous certainties shot to hell (Can you say “War Doctor”? I knew you could…) He’s having to face a Clara who, in spite of having traveled his entire prior life-tangle, does not KNOW him just because he’s changed his face: his “eternal” love not only fails to be eternal, she fails to be his “love.”

We get to watch him retrench. Start over. Try to establish a new set of parameters for himself and the Impossible Girl, who can’t be what he hoped for, while avoiding his “wife,” whose death haunts him. We see him forge a Donna-like relationship with Clara, on new terms, with new understanding. She may not be what he hoped, but she’s more than merely mortal in ways that matter—and soon she’s mourning the Death of Danny Pink just as he’s mourning the death/impending death of River. They are widowed together. She is his child/mirror/protégé.

At the same time we’re allowed to follow the narrative of “Me.” Ashildr, who is herself “immortal.”

Ashildr is “proof” that the Doctor can’t hope to simply magic up a perfect, immortal companion/mate. In the end she’s an ego wrapped in a handwritten approximation of self, her memories largely reconstructed from her own diaries, her personality bent through so many different mortal pains she no longer bears much clear relationship to the girl she began as. She’s another route blocked off. She's also a cautionary tale: the Doctor's commented before that he's lived so long he no longer remembers how hold he is. When might he stop remembering who he is at all? When will he no longer even remember "what it was like when I was the Doctor?"

Yet Clara is growing, expanding, changing, and she’s still the Impossible Girl. She partakes of certain elements of the Doctor’s own nature. She’s been imprinted on his very life. She could still, perhaps, become an immortal companion/girlfriend/fellow widow.

And then Clara, too, dies.

And then the Doctor harrows heaven and hell to retrieve her.

And then she steals his memories, leaving us wondering how much he has recorded, like Ashildr, to allow him to reconstruct any of it.

And then he mourns the loss of the Impossible Girl, haunted by a chalk painting of her in a twining copse of roses (Suggesting Rose, perhaps?) drawn on his Tardis—and in the melody of a Song.

(There’s always a Song when you need it most….)

And then he lands on a planet at Christmastime and ends up at the one place he’s been avoiding for centuries—millennia—of his time. Darillium, to see the Singing Towers.

And then he finds what all his fear has cost River…that she has spent all HER years certain he does not love her.

(And yet, she perserveres…)

(And yet, she still loves him…)

And he finally marries her. Really marries her. Gives himself to her for her life—and her death.

And then we see his mourning—in the “Doctor Mysterio” Christmas special, but even more in the season of companionship with Bill, as he struggles to find hope and companionship again: with Bill’s asexual stability. With Nardole’s steady mother-hen routines. Most of all, with Missy, his only real peer—the Other Immortal. The dear frenemy we have already seen the Doctor loves beyond all good sense.

It all flows together and makes sense, you see. Emotional sense. Good, sound, comprehensible, LOVING sense. Moffat has looked into the Doctor and seen a myth with two hearts—and both hearts ache. An immortal helpless in the face of a dying universe. A man who wants love, and feels love, and fears love, and hides from his love, all because love is so fleeting.

I like Moffat. I love his arcs. I love his sense of the Doctor as both great and strong—and silly and sad.

I will miss him.

I hope to hell Chibnal can come close to anything that rich.


	3. The Call of the Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If the Doctor can be seen as toying with love and death over the last long arc, how might that play in to the 13th regeneration coming back as female? Is there a narrative line there that Chibnal might capitalize on?

I have argued in my previous installments that Moffat (and perhaps also Davies, to a lesser degree) has written a long, tangled exploration of the Doctor's loneliness, his longing for an eternal companion and an end to "goodbye," his increasing search for romantic love not just platonic love, and his increasing despair that everyone dies. It's been an explicit theme throughout NuWho, and it's not alien to Original Who, either. The Doctor's never been shy about saying "...immortality was a curse. Not a blessing." (First Doctor, in The Five Doctors, '83). Moffat has simply been pushing it harder and harder over the past decade. Now, I think that's both honest and sensible. If the Doctor does not despair over losing beloved companion after beloved companion, much of his behavior over the entire 50+ years makes little sense, and to the degree it does it's a bit dastardly. If, for example, he ditches Sarah Jane as they begin to get romantically aligned, and does so as brutally as he does, well--he's not the Doctor is he? He's a "cad in a blue box."

Over the many years of being a Who fan, I've heard many people, male and female, myself included, blather on about the original Doctor and his lack of emotional entanglement with nubile young women. Responses have been everything from flip and cheeky (or wistfully optimistic in a few cases), announcing him to be a closeted gay avoiding the archetypal boy-girl stuff because he can't respond, and in that period could not have responded on TV. I've heard it argued as a kind of racial-species thing, as Missy does to Bill regarding friendship: Time Lords don't make friends with humans. They keep pets. And I've encountered it in the romanticized, "oh, the lonely one" sighs and heart-throb applied to all the isolated, misunderstood genius-exiles of fiction: Sherlock Holmes, Spock of Vulcan, virtually any male serial genre protagonist in modern history. No matter what the underlying assumption or explanation, as long as the Doctor was framed in the original style, without romances, it was possible to at least avoid the "fridging" of love interests and the cheapening of the romantic bond. If the Doctor does not fall in love, or even fall into needful friendship, he may grieve companions who leave or die, but it's not to be expected he'll be shattered at their loss. He never let them get their hooks that deep into him. Thus companions become as interchangeable and expendable as individual regenerations of the Doctor, making the show the absolute perfect "shuffle the deck and play a new hand" sort of show. You can always freshen the show by changing out the Doctor, the companions, or both.

That started to come apart under Davies, whose 9th Doctor, stricken and traumatized and despairing and suicidal from the Time Wars, finds Rose and gloms onto her like a vampire gloms onto a nubile, long-necked young woman in a lace peignoir with a low decolletage. She is a source of life, and joi de vivre, and for the first time we were given a Doctor who NEEDED his companion, and who was falling in love with her out of that hunger for life and energy and wonder. Christopher Eccleston, working with Billie Piper and with Russell Davies' scripts, did something I would previously have argued was impossible: not only did he perform a version of the Doctor falling in love with a companion, he showed the Doctor falling in love with a complete nightmare of a bad match.

Let's be honest about Rose: she's only 19--by the Doctor's standards virtually an infant. She's not really terribly bright. Indeed, she's often agonizingly STUPID. She's self-centered in a way that is forgiven in the young, but only just barely forgiven, and which is despised in adults. She's rude. She's actually not so much curious as hooked on adrenaline rush and the gaudy show the Doctor performs for her. She's thoughtless. She's manipulative. (grimace) I have long struggled with a temptation to accuse Davies of writing Rose as a gay young man's sense of what straight young women are like when they walk off with the men the gay young man wanted. "What the hell does he see in *HER*?" All the frustration anyone would feel at seeing any man thinking with his cock, in the presence of a nubile young thing who has no real redeeming assets except an ability to ingratiate herself and dig in for the duration. Rose is pretty, ignorant, selfish, thoughtless, shallow, and in love with love and romance in their own right, more than she is in love with the "real" Doctor. She loves having a story book hero. She does not comprehend that hero very well...and certainly does not understand that the 9th and 10th Doctors are infatuated with her in part because they themselves are no longer capable of innocent, shallow greed for life.

Eccleston made it work, and Tennant was able to follow after, because Eccleston and Davies presented us with a Doctor so tired, and battered, and dark, and wounded, that Rose is an understandable corrective. She is indeed pretty, and delighted to play his Princess and tourist, and she is happy to be loved by someone so exotic and powerful--she responds, with some confusion and some sparkling fascination. Put that dark, brooding Hamlet/Byron Doctor next to the pretty, shiny girl, and the hunger all made perfect sense, and Tennant successfully parlayed it into full chivalry and ROMANCE. Though Tennant was also the one who could fall in love with Madame Pompadour and Queen Liz I. Among others. If Eccleston was the first Doctor to turn to a companion for a life-force transfusion, tangling it with infatuation and longing, Tennant was the first Doctor to be openly, actively a bit of a time-hopping playboy, and the first to hint at the principle that monogamy over infinite time travel is probably a bit of a wash. After all, even if you vow "Until death do we part," a time jump of a century usually ensures you're in some point of time when your partner was not alive...

And so we go after that, from Eccleston in a straight-line drive to Capaldi, mourning Clara and River Song to the point of breaking. Because, you see, once you allow the Doctor to love, he's got to love as profoundly and as completely as he does anything else, or we're back to "Doctor Cad in a blue box." Love 'em and leave 'em. A woman in every space-time location. Love is cheapened. Romance is made empty of meaning: a thing you do while waiting for your current squeeze to die. Or companions become the fridge-able, disposable cheap sacrifice thrown to the gods of melodrama to allow your male lead to go crashing into yet another epic narrative. In the case of a character like the Doctor, we have been show what a being of the Doctor's nature can do when handed a "fridge" plot. He spends four billion years going over the top to save Clara, realizes he can't be trusted to be rational about it all, and he gives her a choice: one of them has to go, memory-wise. in the end it's the Doctor who goes, because he and the show and the universe can't sustain a man who loves on that scale, and mourns on that scale.

And so we get to a point in the arc where there's no clear way out for the Doctor. He doesn't want to be alone. He knows he wants and needs love. He has failed over and over to establish it--with Rose, with Doctor-Donna, with Amy, with River, with Clara, and finally with a Missy struggling to reform. He's come to the wall he can't break through, even with four billion years to work at it. He's regenerated over and over. He's on a new cycle with no clear end in sight. He's spent thousands of years exploring the world as a man. He's tired and he can't keep doing this. So--what is left to do but die?

Now that's where I think Moffat has done something interesting and effective regarding both the romance arc and the need for the 12th Doctor to find renewal that will allow him to regenerate rather than struggle to off himself.

Stop and think about that quick series of flashbacks of former Companions calling the Doctor as he yet again begins regenerating, at the very end of "The Doctor Falls." Bill and Nardole call him--sensible. He's just now leaving that life and those companions, whom he loved. Dearly. Then it goes on.

There's something interesting and odd about the collection of Companions who call to the Doctor in his hallucinatory flashback sequence. Barring Nardole and Captain Jack, the boys are missing. No Rory. No Wilf. No Mickey. No Commander Strax. No Craig Owens. Certainly none of the Old Who male Companions. Instead it's the women--and in Jack's case, a male established to at least hint at the possibility of a romantic same-sex pairing. Leaving only Nardole as the "odd man out," and we do not know enough about Nardole's sexuality to know if he and the Doctor could have shared some comfort or not.

But mainly it's the female/pansexual companions who hovered, anywhere between Martha's unrequited but unmistakable longing, to Sarah Jane, the one Old Who companion most fans half-suspected the Doctor adored, to River, to, yes--Missy. His oldest, dearest frenemy. The female incarnation of the Master who was willing to change with and for the Doctor, and who offered him a similarly long-lived partner.

As he's dying, they call to him. Summon him. Bring him back...and perhaps offer him a new way to go.

The definition of insanity, according to Einstein, was doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome. The Doctor has spent 13 lives and who knows how many millennia trying out the world as a white man, mostly a white man somewhere in his prime--mostly still hale and hearty. Thousands of years. Never changed race, never changed gender, no matter how bored he got, no matter how dead-ended he was, no matter how difficult it was to work out his relationships. He switches out his DNA entirely every time he regenerates and he never tries anything but vanilla. He takes the model with dangly bits, each and every time, then struggles with the same problems from exactly the same perspective, each and every time. He may love his female companions, but he never considers even the progress he might make by *being* one of them for awhile.

If your love-life keeps going paws up, and you have an actual chance to try seeing it from the other side of the difference, why NOT try? If nothing else, even if it won't solve the question of love, it will give at least a few life-times of experiencing life from a very different sight-line. It will open up interesting lines of inquiry. Ideally rather than offering cliched stories, it will allow brief, scintillating moments of observation. Just one second when the Doctor can say, "Oh, this looks quite different from here on the balcony rather than down in the pit!" It allows for problems that need to be solved in a Doctorish way, but not the MALE Doctorish way.

God willing, it will allow for skillful transposition, by good writers and a good actress changing key rather than changing melody.

That gives us so many things. First, it gives us a Doctor accepting his beloveds' challenge to try life again--from their perspective: a new life as homage and celebration of the women (and pansexuals) he's known and loved. Love pointing him to a new road.

It buys us time on the Romance and the Doctor thing, as the Doctor finds her footing as just "The Doctor" for awhile. Though Chibnal could be bold and offer us a new romance as well... (If he did that well, I would be intrigued, though wary...)

It makes sense--the one obvious change the Doctor could make to feel he's not just going through the cycle again, blind and weary and unable to get out of his rut. It makes that gender change make dramatic sense, as well as "PC sense." It unifies the need of any good show-runner to find *SOMETHING* the Doctor has not already been and done, with the Doctor's own need for change. Instead of being purely imposed from outside, the gender change becomes something embraced from within. A way to "join" his beloved female companions. A way to experience something truly new to him. A way out of the insanity of doing the same things over and over, expecting them to differ when nothing changes.

Moffat pushed Capaldi's 12th to the very ends of despair over the past 3 seasons, going deeper and deeper into weary surrender to doubt and loss. He pushed it to the hard wall in "The Doctor Falls," and then he opened a door through the women's calls--and then, magically, handed us the First Doctor, suffering his own crisis of regeneration.

We've always known that the First Doctor was running from some grief or loss. You do not flee your people in a stolen, damaged Tardis, with your young granddaughter in tow, without there being things to run away from, including the most obvious: any other family besides that granddaughter. Was there a dead wife, or a failed marriage before the First Doctor's escape. Why are River and Susan the two "family members" whose pictures make it all the way to his desk-top after he regenerated into 12? What love and loss and loneliness did the Doctor run away from--he who runs away from so many things? Why is he willing to die the true death the first time, as well as the 13th? What will his first incarnation and the Capaldi incarnation find to teach each other about the courage of going on?

And, given where we've been taken over Davies' and Moffat's times as show-runners, what will we learn in years to come about love and the Doctor, through the new eyes of a Chibnal-scripted female Doctor? What will change, and what will remain marvelously, gleefully the same?

I HOPE Chibnal, his team, and Whittaker handle this well. They've certainly been handed a way in that gives them all kinds of rational, emotionally sane directions to grow.


	4. Random Thoughts About a Female Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What it says on the tin. I'm just sort of doing a mental random walk through a mess of ideas without much in common besides that they do tie to a female regeneration.

I continue to be appalled and entertained by the few, the loud, the agonized who consider the upcoming gender switch of the Doctor to be a perverse, calculated thing of evil. Nothing about the situation seems to register with them. 

"But the Doctor has never been a woman before."

Yes. And? 

"He's a MAN."

Are you saying that if you were given the power of regeneration, all the way down to your DNA, all the way up to being canonically able to even change species (Romana did, after all...), you would never, never, never, never, never, in no matter how many thousand years, come back as a woman? Really? You think the Doctor would be that incurious?

That keeps getting me. Alive for thousands of years, with a "try out the other model" option AND THE ABILITY TO CHANGE BACK IN ANOTHER REGENERATION IF IT"S HORRIBLE, and you'd never become female? Ever? Why? Is it that catastrophic? Or does it give you regenerational cooties of some sort? 

There's a clear sense running through the regenerations that, while the Doctor is not in full conscious control of his shifts, he's at least subconsciously able to influence them. He chose his most recent face, even if he still didn't manage to come back as a ginger. Are we to assume that while the Doctor COULD come back female, he never would? Or are  we to assume that changing gender is even more radical than changing species--and thus that no matter how many random changes the Doctor made, gender would never be one of them?

I mean, that's one hell of a loud rejection of a possibility.

And then there's the whole insistence that it should only have happened if, out of the blue, some woman walked in whose performance was so brilliant it tossed the show-runner up against the wall, put him in an armlock, and demanded the role by right of theatrical conquest. "Maaaaybe, if someone showed up who was just that good. Otherwise, it's all rigged--trying to please the SJWs."

Um, ok. First, I am not sure anyone in the world is good enough to force a show-runner to cast them if it goes against the direction the show-runner wants to go. And if the show runner isn't already considering and looking for a female actor, she's not going to get to audition in the first place. And in most casting situations, there's already a presort in the sense that the casting director and producer and so on have already made some choices about who not to consider. I'm willing to bet that George Lucas did not hold no-spec open auditions for Han Solo--auditions so very wide open that there were girls and fat chicks and old men and so on. The only way a woman is going to get a chance to audition for the Doctor is if the producer/show runner/casting director is already thinking of that option, and letting agents know to send around their Gurlz as well as their Manly Men. And that is as it should be. There's not time enough in the day for a casting director to watch every single possible permutation of who could play a part. Of COURSE Chibnal had to have made it clear that Gurlz were welcome to try out. 

Then there are the folks moaning that it's just emotionally jarring change for the sake of change.

Yes? And? The entire advantage of having regenerations is so the show can indulge in change for the sake of change. New face. New actor. New persona. New point of view. New stories you can tell, or old stories you can tell in a different key. The very fact that so many are finding it so shocking is a perfect example of why you'd do it. The Doctor's changes are supposed to have that kind of bone-rattling surprise to them. The less it's there, the less the Doctor is the Doctor and the less regeneration is of any real dramatic use. 

People are talking about regeneration and change as though they're something that should only happen as a desperate answer to some dire necessity. Only if you haaaaave to. Otherwise you should keep doing the same thing in the most familiar way you can.

But that's a contradiction of regeneration itself, in terms of its dramatic use. You do not change the Doctor out only when absolutely forced to. If you did, there would be a lot more 10-year Doctors out there, and their replacements would all be of much the same age and manner. Arguing against rocking the boat misses the entire point of the trope. It's intended to rock the boat plenty.

"The Doctor is an important role model for boys."

So--the world will end if she gets to be a role model for girls for a few years, too? 

You know the answer to this is that no Manly Boy would be willing to admire and be influenced by some pansy-ass Doctor who had ever willingly worn female genitals. Once you've got girl cooties, you're never allowed to be a role model for Manly Boys again.  The idea that "she" may well--should eventually--return to a male regeneration is not enough to calm the hysteria over a 3-5 year stint as a woman. 

It reminds me a bit of the "one drop of negro blood" thing Americans suffer from. If you're even a little black, you're all black. Apparently if you even regenerate once as a corrupt, dissolute female, you're going to be female in some sense forever. And not in a good way.

The arguments keep failing to make much sense in terms of the show. the nature of regeneration, the logic of changes all the way down to DNA. Nor do they may sense in terms of how shows are cast, or how any sensible show runner thinks.

I mean--there's this "OMG, Chibnal knew from the start he wanted a female Doctor, so the casting was *rigged.* It was *unfair casting*."

Um, yeah. If you're show-runner, then God pray you have some idea of a few stories you particularly want to tell. And God pray you're smart enough to send out casting calls to actors who can tell those particular stories. And if you think you'd like to tell a story that draws on the Doctor being a female, then, yes--God pray you're smart enough and have enough foresight to ask for female actors to auditon, and to even tag a few you already know you like and work well with. That's how casting WORKS you morons. It's rigged to give the show runner the kind of actor he or she hopes to see. Occasionally some actor will give a new, novel reading that is enough to *change* what the show runner was planning. Moffat wanted an older Doctor, but Smith offered something strong enough to overcome Moffat's preference. That still does not mean a show runner could, or should, or would go into a casting cycle without having some ideas to put forward, and some limits already drawn in the sand. 

"If he wanted to cast a woman, then it's rigged. And if it's rigged, it's just a publicity stunt to appease the SJWs."

Chibnal's got the reputation and the career to refuse to do the show unless he wanted to and thought it would be interesting. He's apparently the one who suggested it go female, not the Beeb...so he's not caving to fandom, he's bringing the idea in with him. And even if that were false--what's wrong with pleasing a portion of your fandom on a point that's reversable in the future? Again, just because this regeneration is female does not mean the next one will be. Regeneration's funny like that. Why NOT give fan factions the occasional regeneration that will appeal to them? 

That's the thing that's fascinating about it all. The idea that pleasing SJWs is some kind of wrongful action. Like there is something WRONG with letting the Doctor be female for a loop. That's the underlying message. It's *wrong* for the Doctor to be female. It's a sign of some kind of degeneracy. It's a moral weakness of character. it should only be done if it's necessary--and it will never be necessary. 

That's one hell of an aversion, there. Not sane. But still, quite an aversion. 

Meanwhile--

 

It occurs to me that Moffat is too clever to have written Bill's lines about wanting to be SURE the Doctor knows she has a thing for women--her own age--if he didn't hope to see it used later. With so little clear about Chibnal it's hard to know where that is going. But it's still hard to miss that, lo and behold, the Doctor is quite suddenly female, and at least visually "Bill's age." And while the core persona may be much older than Bill, it can be made up for by the fact that the Doctor is younger than Bill *as a woman.*

At the very least, it should provide some fan writers with some fun fics. 

"The Doctor won't be able to fly the Tardis right, now she's a woman." Um--yeah? And when did he ever fly it right? I mean, really?

That's it for now. Just blathering. See you all soon.


End file.
